Five letters, none in its own envelope
Question
Five letters and their five matching addressed envelopes get mixed up, and the letters are stuffed into the envelopes completely at random, one per envelope. Find the probability that no letter is in its correct envelope.
Short answer
. This counts derangements: by inclusion–exclusion the number of permutations of with no fixed point is , and .
Adapted from Zhou, A Practical Guide to Quantitative Finance Interviews, sec. 4.2 Combinatorial Analysis, 'Application letters', p.68; question and answer rewritten by SelfMadeQuant.com.
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Open the worked solutionLessons behind this question
- Counting and Combinatorics
- Sample Spaces, Events, and the Probability Axioms
- Conditional Probability, Total Probability, and Bayes' Rule
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